It’s been so long since the last time went to Japan. Finally I’m back in one of my favorite places.

Used Pelican static site generator for blogging for a good few months. It was really fast and easy to use, but there is one down side, its very difficult to post something on my phone. So, I decided to come back and use WordPress. Its not as fast as static site, but its a lot easier when I just wanna quick post something using my phone.

Setting it up is also very easy. At first, I wanted to try using docker to save some time on preparing the LNMP stack on my Pi. In the end I found that Its not as straight forward as I thought if I wanna enable SSL for my site because Namecheap doesn’t support LetsEncrypt. So I went back to the good old LNMP way, a simple and quick setup and the site is back up in less than 30mins.

It’s annoying that Namecheap doesn’t support Certbot to create and auto renew Let’s Encrypt SSL Cert.

I will document the steps needed to renew SSL cert manually using DNS Challenge.

Step 1 – Install Certbot:

sudo apt install certbot

Step 2 – Renew certificate using Certbot:

Replace *.DOMAIN to your domain name.

sudo certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges dns -d "*.DOMAIN"

Step 3 – Replace DNS TXT ACME Challenge in Namecheap:

Verify the setting using nslookup before continuing on Certbot.

nslookup -type=TXT _acme-challenge.DOMAIN

Final step – Restart NGINX and verify:

If the above are done correctly, the cert should be renewed by now. Restart NGINX for the new SSL cert to take effect.

sudo systemctl restart nginx